Several broadcast media services are now available to automobiles and other mobile vehicles, including satellite radio, amplitude modulation (AM) radio, frequency modulation (FM) radio, and television broadcasts. Over 40% of radio listening in the United States takes place in mobile vehicles, the most popular location for receiving radio broadcasts. With the advent of portable media playback devices such as CD and DVD players, even more content is made available in the mobile vehicle.
A satellite radio service provider uses one or more satellites to broadcast content for each of its channels, and often has terrestrial repeaters to improve broadcast coverage in areas of satellite signal blockage. A satellite signal can contain hundreds of channels, the number depending on bandwidth and channel compression, and encoding parameters. Many of these broadcasts may be delivered with additional data such as station identification, song titles, and program schedules. Thus, satellite radio providers offer an overwhelming amount of content to a typical user. Moreover, the typical user can also select from AM radio, FM radio and content from other media channels (such as DVD and television content). Such an array of choices is dazzling at best and may be confusing at worst.
Generally a potential subscriber is only interested in a few stations and a limited amount of content. For example, a typical user may be interested in a limited subset of the myriad content channels offered (e.g. only the sports channels, only the classical music stations or only talk radio. In fact, a user may be interested in only one or two stations within such subsets. In addition a user may also be interested in fairly specific content from other media (e.g. only children's DVD selections.) In many cases, a potential subscriber may be unwilling or unable to read through the station lists and content descriptions of all the available satellite radio stations or the content from all available media channels. Furthermore, a potential subscriber may not wish to spend a great deal of time manually searching through available media channels.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system and method for selecting media content preferences that are targeted to a specific user of a vehicle and for presenting selected media channels to the user. It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a method for selecting media preferences in a mobile vehicle communication system, and to overcome the deficiencies and obstacles described above.